Safari vs. zoo
While on the dessert extravaganza boat tour outing tonight, I met a Canadian librarian who had an interesting analogy/metaphor about what we do as librarians these days, given the changing technological environment. She said that we used to be more like zoo keepers–everything had it’s place and we gave tours and followed a simple map. Now we’re more like safari guides out in the wilderness–we’re there to guide, but we’re not always sure the path. She articulated it in a clearer way, but you get the idea. Her powerpoint slides (which were a little too large for me to download here) can be found on her site here: http://www2.mtroyal.ca/~mmacmillan/ (click on conferences/workshops).
She also had a neat exercise where she worked with some history students–she broke them into groups and gave each of them a selection of web site print outs, book sections, encyclopedia entries and journal articles (scholarly and trade and popular) and had each group rank the usefulness of each source (all of the material was geared towards a particular topic). She plotted the results on the board and drew a line to show that the resource they considered most useful peaked above books, followed by journal articles. Then she asked them where they thought they should be spending the majority of their research time and they could immediately see.
I also heard some people talking about the teaching resources section of the LOEX site which offers additional exercises…can’t wait to go through it more thoroughly once I’m back: http://www.emich.edu/public/loex/teaching_resources.html
